Why Try to Out-Google Google?

For a long time, the search engine wars were stagnant, but
they appear to be heating up again. AskJeeves has launched a
redesign, Overture bought AltaVista and the web-search
portion of FAST, and MSN is starting to make rumblings about
a search overhaul.

And what am I seeing every time I read one of
these stories? "Challenge Google," "Rival Google," "Out-Google Google." And every time I hear about new initiatives like these my response is the same:

Why?

Why is every search engine out there so revved up to out-Google Google? The Google they aim at today won't be the Google they have to compete against tomorrow. The search
tools they offer have a different set of strengths and
weaknesses than Google's. Why compete on Google's terms?

When I think about this (and I find myself thinking about
this a lot) it strikes me that the things that made Google
successful initially were not technical. Yes, Google has
great search technology, great algorithms, and so forth.
But the average searcher does not care about these.

The average searcher is going to be attracted by a friendly
interface and an easy-to-use site. Yes, the average searcher
will be thrilled with Google's very relevant results. They
may or may not tell their friends about that. It's more
likely that they'll get a good laugh out of Google's
PigeonRank joke and pass that on to their friends, who in
turn can try Google for themselves.

I am very geeky. I do not like dwelling on "touchy-feely"
aspects of business. But I am convinced that there are four
very important things that have made Google successful, which have
little to do with actual technology. Further, as long as
we're talking about search engines wanting to "out-Google
Google," I also wanted to take a look at ways in which Google
could out-Google itself. It's got to evolve sometime, right?

Beyond Technology: What's Made Google Successful?

Related Article:

Eight Search Engine "C" Changes -- Tara Calishain, coauthor of Google Hacks, offers her first installment in a multi-part series on the latest developments for search engines and online data collections. In this article, Tara ponders the future direction search engines may take. How might pay-for-inclusion programs and other revenue generators, for example, change the way we search?

Yes, the search technology is excellent, and the "I'm
Feeling Lucky" button is a stroke of genius. But that's not
all there is to search engine success. If it were just the
search syntax, AltaVista would still be number one. If it were
just the sheer number of pages indexed, wouldn't AlltheWeb
and Google be running neck and neck right now with market
share? In addition to its technology, Google had several
intangibles in its favor.

Good Timing

Google happened on the scene almost at the height of the
portal craze. You remember the portal craze, right? That's
when practically every search engine out there was offering
weather, horoscopes, sports scores, and any other snippets
of information that could be tied to a zip code. If you
weren't actually focused on getting search results, I
suppose these bits of information might have been of interest. But if
you actually wanted to get your search and get on with your
life, these drags on a page load could be distracting. And I
won't even get into the banner ads.

Google's simple front page -- search box, two buttons, and
logo -- were a big breath of fresh air. And not a banner ad
to be found! It was almost too good to be true! When
companies are thinking about out-Googling Google, do you
think they're thinking about how to make the interface even
faster-loading, even more streamlined, and even more
friendly? Or do you think they're thinking about how to look
exactly like Google?

A Sense of the Internet's Culture

It's been a source of much frustration to Google watchers
everywhere that Google remains a private company. But it's
been very good for Google, in my opinion. As a private
company, Google can concentrate on its search engine and
its associated properties. They don't have to publicly
discuss the idea of profit and loss. To all external
appearances, they can be just a happy-go-lucky company that
really loves Internet searching.

Of course, there are grownups at Google whose job it is to
make sure the search engine turns a profit. But
since Google is a private company, it doesn't have to
present that side of itself. They don't have to go on
CNBC and explain their quarterly earnings. They can focus on
what they do, and not how much they're earning or what their
business model is.

On the other hand, if Google did not have a sense of the
Internet's culture, this advantage wouldn't be an advantage.
If Google didn't have its corporate culture to talk about,
the former chef for the Grateful Dead, the odd logos on
holidays, the April Fool's jokes, and so forth, it wouldn't have
the mystique, the coolness, that it does. Google, as a whole,
has a sense of the culture of the Internet, and its
culture blends right in and looks really appealing. Being an
east-coaster, I have never visited the Google office, but despite common
sense, I imagine it as a 24-hour programming fest with
buffet, foosball, and a piped-in soundtrack from Grand Theft
Auto: Vice City.

I can't remember another search engine that has inspired
such admiration on a cultural level, except perhaps
AltaVista when it was still http://altavista.digital.com.
That isn't to say that there weren't good search engines;
there was a time when I adored Looksmart (I think it was
around 1998), but I never thought, "Wow, Looksmart is
cool. It must be really neat to work there." Most
other major search engines and up-and-comers are publicly
owned; what can they do to compete against the private-
company-coolness of Google?

A Willingness to Share

It seems weird to include "A Willingness to Share" as one of
Google's traits o' success, because they've been so
aggressive about asking users not to scrape their search
engine and not to access their index through automated
processes.

But look at it another way: Google has been very good about
releasing its new services in beta, or even the stuff that
its programmers are just fooling around with (via Google Labs). Google's services tend to push toward the end of what's expected in a
search engine. And finally, they released the Google API.
No, it's not perfect, since it does access a very limited
amount of the Google services. It's not finished,
either, since it too is in beta. But it is available, and
it's a tool that Google enthusiasts can use to build their
own tool sets using Google's data, going in all different
directions (witness the strange array of materials covered
in Google Hacks).

Other search engines have not been as loud in their
denunciation of scrapers, but at the same time, they've done
little to make their indexes easily accessible to programmers
and power users. It's like they developed the search engine
for one audience -- a Web surfer -- and had no desire to go
further, to see what services could be offered to a power
user, a programmer, or a search enthusiast.

A Sense of Humor

If you've ever visited Google on April Fool's Day, you're
aware of their sense of humor. There's also
been the occasional odd logos that turn up, as well as some
of the things in the Google store (a lava lamp? A bean bag
chair?).

Now, of course, part of the advantage of the humor is that
it fits in easily with the culture of the Internet, as has
been mentioned before. But another advantage is that it
gives new visitors something to pass along. It's not often
that you run a routine search and get a set of search
results that make you say, "Wow! I want to pass this set of
search results on to all my friends!" On the other hand,
when you come across a good online joke you tend to want to
share it with other people. Google found a great way to
spread memes and attract people to its site.

While other search engines have not been humorless, neither
have they often been deliberately funny. I suspect that's
more because it's hard to evolve a public sense of humor for
a large organization -- things are developed and created by
so many people that it's hard for them to maintain the
unique voice that a sense of humor requires. AlltheWeb has
probably come closest, with its skins contest and the way
it presents its search engine.

Giving a large Internet property like one of the major
search engines a humorous bent is also something that's very
difficult to do -- when a company steps up and says, "From
now on we're going to be ZANY and MADCAP and FILLED WITH SMILES!" it usually ends up embarrassing everybody. But if
it evolves, and it's allowed to evolve, great.

So I've spent 1,400 words or so looking at the non-technical
aspects of what Google did right. Some of the intangible
reasons they got to the top. And now that they've got to the
top, that's it, right? The Google experience is the pinnacle
of everything and cannot be improved upon, right?

Shyeah. C'mon. This is the Internet.

How Google Could Out-Step Itself (Or How Other Search Engines Could Go Beyond What They're Offering Now)

On one hand, looking at the potential of Internet search is
frustrating because of the limiting factors that aren't in
your control. If only XML was widely adopted. If only
everybody used title tags. If only domain names were more
descriptive. Etcetera, etcetera. But on the other hand, other
technology is developing that does make powerful and more
extensive searching and crawling possible. Google could
expand what they've got and become even cooler than they
already are. How? Here are five ways, off the top of my
head.

RSS feeds of all its properties.

The RSS format is a very handy way to read a lot of
different Web sites without spending a lot of time waiting
for pages to load. I'd sure love an RSS feed of Google News
searches on the keyword of my choice.

It's weird about RSS. Lesser-known search engines like
Daypop are making great use of it. But none of the major general search engines are. Why? If the concern is
losing ad revenue, why not include an ad in the RSS feed?

A customizable "all-in-one" search.

I know, I know; an all-in-one search is veering dangerously
close to Portalville. But I think in this case, it's
warranted. Google has so many properties that would provide
complementary resources -- Froogle and Google Catalogs, for
example, or Google's web search paired with results from
Google News. I'd love an interface where I could say, "Give
me the results from this query and use Google News, Google
Web Search, and Google Blogs (that last one is only if the
rumors floating around are true), and then present all the
results on one page." Can't Google (or any other search
engine, really) aggregate its own search sources without
it being portalitis?

Expand its API to other Google properties.

Last summer will forever be burned into my mind as the
summer that I ate, drank, slept, and breathed the Google
API to write Google Hacks. Even now a small part of my brain patiently grinds
away, coming up with neat things to do with Google and the
Google API (and until this part of my brain gives up and
goes away you can see its results at
www.buzztoolbox.com/google/).

But even though I rapidly discovered the tons of
possibilities enabled by Google's API (and I'm very grateful
to them for releasing it), I just as quickly found the
limitations. No access to Google News or Google Images or
most of the other collections. Only 1,000 queries per day, with
only 10 results per query. Not all the special syntaxes
(such as the phonebook: syntax) work. The API would be
even more exciting if access to the other Google properties
were available through it.

Reach out to information-collection publishers.

Google is often reluctant to discuss how the guts of its
indexing technology work, and I can't say that I blame them. If
too much were understood about how Google indexed and ranked
its contents, people would spend too much time playing
"Let's try to fool Google," instead of "Let's try to fill
Google up with excellent content."

The downside of this is that there's a group of content
publishers who are caught in the middle. I'm referring to
librarians and other information professionals who are often
in charge of putting large collections of information
online. Usually, those kinds of content publishers have far
better things to do than spend extensive amounts of time
trying to make sure their content gets indexed. This is a
pity because it is exactly these kinds of information
collections (extensive, unique, often not available anywhere else online) that are so valuable to search engines.

It would be great if Google (or any other search engine)
took some of its resources and made an effort to reach out
to those groups (librarians, information professionals,
government officials, and so forth) who are regularly publishing large information collections, and assist them in getting their content indexed as regularly and completely as possible. How should
they be using title tags? Is their database-driven site restricting
their chances of being indexed? How can they use Google tools
to offer search on their own sites, perhaps with some specialty
forms for sub-collection searching?

Pay attention to successful uses of its API.

I saved this one for last because I suspect that Google's
already doing it, but it wouldn't hurt for it to be mentioned. It
would be great if Google looked around at what folks are
doing with the Google API and incorporated it into their
offerings. No, I don't think they ought to have a
"Goocookin'" section on their site, but what about Google
Alert at www.googlealert.com? That site must have
thousands of users. Isn't that an audience that Google wants
to cultivate?

Like I said, I suspect Google is already doing this. I
wonder if the other search engines are watching what's being
created with the Google API and coming up with some ideas of
their own?

Trying to "out-Google Google" is a bad idea in the fast-moving timestream of the Internet. By the time you think you've out-Googled Google, they've out-Googled themselves and you're
still behind. But if search engines took at close look at
the cultural factors that led to some of Google's success,
and then considered how they could leapfrog what Google's
doing now -- we'd have some search engine competition that
I'd really look forward to!

Tara Calishain
is the creator of the site, ResearchBuzz. She is an expert on Internet search engines and how they can be used effectively in business situations.